One of the particularly entertaining keynotes at the Social Impact Exchange conference was given by Dan Heath, co-author of Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. He spoke about “finding the bright spots” or looking for what is working instead of what is not working. One of his examples was “positive deviance“, a theory for social change which was most famously used to combat malnutrition. The story is this: Jerry Sternin was working as a staff member in the 1990s for Save the Children and was sent to Vietnam to work on issues of malnutrition. He was given six months to show signs of improvement. When he arrived, the experts catalogued for him the myriad issues that were preventing proper nutrition — poor sanitation, rampant poverty, no access to clean water. He dubbed this information “TBU”, or true-but-useless, because there was no way that he could improve sanitation, solve poverty and provide access to water in a timespan to help these children, much less six months.
So what did he do? Instead of throwing up his hands in dispair, he went out to find what was working. He traveled to rural villages and spoke with groups of mothers and asked them, where are the healthy children? And sure enough, there were a minority of very healthy children amongst the scores of malnourished. When he found these children, he studied their mothers’ cooking habits and discovered that these families were keeping a small sprinkling of shrimp in their rice, rather than discarding them as was the normal custom. He also found that some mothers fed their children sweet potato greens, which were considered a lower class food and were therefore not in high demand. Finally, he found that some mothers fed their children four small bowls of food, rather than two large bowls – which is easier for a hungry child to digest.
Through cooking classes and word-of-mouth, the news about these simple changes spread like wildfire. Within six months, two-thirds of the children in these villages were demonstrably better nourished. The model has spread around the world and now serves as a method for combatting malnutrition in twenty countries.
It’s a story that made me sit back and think. First, as a self-professed “new stuff” junkie, I am often seduced by the new new thing, when the answer is perhaps sitting right under my nose. Second, policy-makers (and their fancy consultants) are paid and lauded for complexity and innovation, which is possibly creating incorrect incentives. And finally, this one a question – would our collective investments in time, money and energy would be best served by identifying and amplifying the home-grown solutions, (and perhaps even exporting them, as promoted by Lord Nigel Crisp)?
